Nanoampere pumping of Cooper pairs

The authors have employed a tunable Cooper-pair transistor, the sluice, with radio frequency control to pump current over a resistive circuit. They find that the charge transferred per pumping cycle can be controlled with the resolution of a single Cooper pair up to hundreds of pairs. The achieved nanoampere current features more than an order of magnitude improvement over the previously reported results and it is close to the theoretical maximum value for the measured sample. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.